The American Physical Society (APS) – the world’s largest organization of physicists – has awarded the 2026 Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics to Stefano Baroni, Professor of Condensed Matter Physics at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA) and research associate at the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche – Istituto Officina dei Materiali (CNR–IOM). The prize is regarded as the most prestigious international recognition in the field, awarded for outstanding achievements in computational physics.

The official citation recognizes his “seminal contributions to the development of first-principles methods for studying the electronic and thermal properties of condensed systems, and for the development and dissemination of open-source software for electronic-structure calculations, now widely adopted.”

Artificial intelligence (AI) and “protein language” models can speed the design of monoclonal antibodies that prevent or reduce the severity of potentially life-threatening viral infections, according to a multi-institutional study led by researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

When scientists make the thin metal films used in electronics, optics, and quantum technologies, they usually spend months tinkering with the temperature, composition and timing of the process, hoping to land on just the right recipe. Now, researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) have built a “self-driving” lab system that does this work on its own, using robotics and artificial intelligence to decide the next best step without waiting for a human.

In a new paper published in Nature Photonics, researchers at Columbia Engineering have discovered that the thin-film metallic resistor routinely used to thermally tune photonic devices to the desired resonance frequency can also measure temperature. That simple, intrinsic detail may eliminate the need for bulky and costly external temperature sensors and help integrated photonics reach its full potential.